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REMARKS SUGGKSTED 



ur 



PRESIDENT GARFIELD'S DEATH 



N. F. DAVIN. 



OTTAWA : 

J. DURIE & SON. 
1881. 



# 



REMARKS SUGGESTED 



BY 



PRESIDENT GARFIELD'S DEATH 



BY 



N. F. DIVIN. 



OTTAWA : 

J D U R I E & S X 
1881. 



'D-L.5" 



Printed by Maclean, Eoger & Co. 



To His Excellency the Right Honourable Sir John Douglas 
Sutherland Campbell, K.T., G.C.M.G., P.C., Marquis 
of Lome, Governor General of Canada. 

My Loed, — The reason why I desired the honour of 
dedicating this small pamphlet to Your Excellency, will be 
found in the simplicity and manliness of your character in 
■which, as well as in the stainless example of your private 
life, and the fruitful blending of literary culture with 
political activity, there are points of resemblance to the late 
President of the United States. 

The reason I republish a fugitive magazine article is this : 
the subject not only gave me an opportunity of stating 
the grounds on which, in a free country, a man should act 
with a party and why he should regard fidelity to his party 
as rendered imperative by honour and patriotism, but — such 
was the breath of interest attaching to the President's demise 
— also of rebuking those English literary men who in 
depreciating Canada are disloyal to England, and who 
humiliate every man in the Empire by their constant 
scribbling of peddling treason. And in this connexion, my 
Lord, I cannot forbear to express for my part the delight 
with which the people of Canada have watched Your 
Excellency develope into a thorough Canadian. The rapid 



IV 

progress made by Canada shows of what stuff the old and 
middle aged are made ; and no one who knows the young 
men of this great nation in embryo can doubt that the 
possibilities of the future, however splendid, may safely be 
committed to their hands. 

I have the honour to be, 
My Lord, 
Your Excellency's obedient Servant, 

N. F. DAVIN. 
Ottawa, December 5th, 1881. 






REMARKS SUGaESTED BY PRESIDENT GARFIELD'S 

DEATH. 

ON the death of the late President of the United States, all 
has been said that grief and sympathy could desire ; but 
much that should be said could find no place in condolences 
and threnodies. The printing press and the telegraph have 
given to the doctrine of human brotherhood a deeper signi- 
ficance, as well as the means of practical expression. A Greek 
historian put in the mouth of an Athenian statesman the fine 
hyperbole : that of dead men, who living were great, the 
whole earth is the mausoleum. To-day, what was a flight of 
rhetoric in the time of Thucydides, the new^sboy makes 
almost a literal fact. A few years ago Charles Kingsley, 
when lecturing in Toronto, advised the young men of Canada 
to aspire to Westminster Abbey. It would seem that an 
ambition for funeral pomp may be realized without sending 
the hearse across the Atlantic ; and for the fond hope of being 
remembered by our race, not pyramid, nor temple, nor column, 
nor the breathing marble, but the heart and memory of 
humanity are the enduring shrines of the benefactors of 
mankind, and these are monuments which are circumscribed 
to no spot, belong to no one hemisphere, nor do their doors 
open and close at the bidding of interest or power. It is true, 
a man may write his name indelibly on this earth in the blood 
of his fellows, but the time is at hand when men will neither 
honour nor covet the renown of a destroyer. High gifts, even 
when they do not bear the hallmark of the immortals, if 
conscientiously used, may henceforth look for recognition in 
the esteem of good men w^herever civilization reaches, and 
this is the only element in an apotheosis a really great man 
would value. The spectacle, if the word may be used, of 



6 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

nations — not merely rulers, but the peoples of the earth — 
crowding as mourners round Mr. G-arfield's coffin, without 
escutcheon or crest, was well calculated to move and fill the 
imagination. It has been misunderstood and misinterpreted 
by writers, who in grief or joy must beat what Lord Salis- 
bury calls the ' Tom-tom of Free Trade.' So far as it had 
any bearing on the future of international politics, not 
increased friendliness between any two nations, except as an 
incidental result, was portended, but the advent of a demo- 
cratic consciousness in which social ideas will count for as 
much as political, and which, finding nothing to feed its 
enthusiasm in the past, will inevitably turn to the future and 
unknown. 

It is, of course, possible to overestimate the importance of 
such a wave of emotion, and the reaction has already set 
in. It may be said that the cosmopolitan consensus of sorrow 
yields to analysis only a commonplace scientific fact : the 
annihilation of space by the telegraph, which placed the 
residents of London or Melbourne in the same po sition, as to 
knowledge of the President's sufferings, as the inhabitants ot 
Washington. Had he been the humblest labourer, or a soldier 
who had done nothing, but for forcing an account of whose 
sufierings on public attention an excuse could have been 
found, there would, when death arrived, have been world- 
wide sorrow ; but in nature and depth, it would have been 
very different from that we are discussing. That G-arfield 
had a mission ; that he had been a poor struggling lad ; that 
he had gained the position of a great potentate ; that he was 
a politician guided by principle and honour ; that his ideal 
of the political character was high ; that his ambition was 
not to gather a little fussy importance to himself but to 
serve his country so that she would be better because duty 
had called him from the attractive seclusion of his study into 
the turbulent arena of party stife ; all this, vaguely in 



BY PRESIDENT GARFIELD 8 DEATH. 7 

some instances, more defined in others, ^yas present to the 
mind, and, while raig-hty interests seemed to hang upon his 
fate, brought him near the hearts of men. From daily reading 
of his sufferings, pathetic association^ clustered every morn- 
ing more thickly and closely around his name, and the foun- 
tains of feeling flowed as by habit of sympathy at its sound. 
* We felt,' said a poor gardener, ' almost as if he had been one 
of ourselves.' 

On such a theme as the present, perhaps one ought to be 
above a sneer at human generosity, the eager desire — the pen 
hesitates to write the noble desire — to do full justice to the 
claims of one who can no longer compete with us. "When a 
man achieves supreme power, he is in a sense as much 
removed from conditions which excite envy as if he were 
dead. Fear, hope, hatred, love, admiration, loyalty, such are 
the sentiments men entertain to their rulers or leaders ; and 
when one who has attained to this height is struck down, 
pity and imagination are unrestrained. The mind fills up a 
broken career with great deeds, and finds a pleasure in doing 
this, because they are no longer within anybody's reach. So 
different are the feelings with which we contemplate the 
deeds of the living and the dreams of what the dead would 
have done. Had the young Marcellus lived, Virgil might 
have lampooned him. 

"When we pass away from the personal to the national 
aspect of the tragedy, we think that the achievements 
which would have brought Garfield honour would have 
conferred blessings on a country in which, as in our own, 
the hopes of the world are largely bound up. Since the 
war, most people would give a policy on its life. Even 
those who look on it with far other regards than are 
cherished by the unprivileged children of poverty, feel that 
it is best for the world that its government should be honest 
and enlightened. The Queen, in sending a floral wreath to 



8 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

Mrs. Garfield, did an act the beauty of which no vulgar 
analysis can mar. We may be sure she was only thinking 
of doing something graceful, womanly, kind, and that there 
were no mercenary calculations in the motives which pre- 
sented themselves to her mind, when the woman bent over 
a sister, prostrated by a grief she could well understand, and 
the ruler expressed an Empire's sympathy. In an article 
entitled ' England and America over the President's grave,' 
the editor of the Contemporary Review reminds one of a 
gossip at a wake shedding copious tears, and expressing a 
hope that the bereaved, with whom she has not been on 
good terms, will henceforth buy their groceries at her shop. 
This apostle of humanity demands special room in the 
funeral procession for England, as represented by the Queen, 
in order to appeal to the people of the United States, over 
the open grave of their ruler, and in the midst of their 
sorrow — to do what ? — the reader will not believe it — to open 
their ports to the English manufacturer. This is to be 
accomplished by ' the logic of emotion,' and the barriers 
which have withstood the assaults of great economists are 
to fall before the tear-vial and red eyes of the editor of the 
Contemporary Review ! The ' prejudices ' of the commercially 
unregenerate people of the United States ' have shown them- 
steel proof against the exactest reasoning.' That this hard- 
ness of conviction is due to the heart rather than the head is 
evident, because ' it has been proved to us in quite a variety 
of ways long since that Yankee wits are not really suffering 
any dulness.' He despairs oi syllogisms, however neatly 
constructed ; ' but for ourselves,' he says, ' we are not wholly 
without faith that they may in the end fall in quite another 
manner.' And this is the way they are to fall : 

' But the key-note meant to be sounded in this paper utterly forbids the 
making of any ad misericordiam appeal. The only way in which we could 
here reason from merely English grounds would be to try and convict the 
States of shahhiness — if such a word may be allowed — in respect of our 
grievances. Nor do we think it would be diflSicult to do that if only our 



BV PRESIDENT QARFIELD's DEATH. 

iranaatlantic brethren were in (he right emotional mood for listening. We 
claim for our own country that she, a small island in the corners of the 
Beaa, has really adopted the cosmopolitan ideal of universal intercourse 
and free exchange, the propagation of which Htly should devolve, as a first 
duty, upon the gigantic mistress of the New World. ' • * la it 
quite worthy of big America to show this fear of little England's 
industrial competition, meantime sending us not only wheat by millions 
0/ bushels, pork by the ship-load, and other things in corresponding quan- 
tities, down even to machine-made horse-shoe nails, reckoned by hundreds 
of ions ; the latter, perhaps, as a charm on her oion part against her 
fright becoming a panic. This shall be considered " cuteness " if our big 
and timorous cousins so wish, and we will be sympathetic with them over it, 
for are we not in the present article avowedly relying on the logic of 
emotion ? ' 

It is hard to express oneself in terms sufficiently restrained 
of such writing as this. Scorn and mirth are alike stirred. 
The humour of that allusion to the horse-shoe nails is of the 
finest sort, and even the seriousness is irresistibly comic 
when one remembers who those are whose commercial 
affairs are to be revolutionized by a little maudlin gush. 
But the matter is too grave for laughter, for the Contemporary 
Review, to which the editor seldom contributes, has a posi- 
tion in English periodical literature ; and, therefore, one 
cannot pass by with the contempt it deserves a sickening 
preachment insulting to the affliction of the United States 
and a desecration of the noble grief of the English nation. 
We are sorry, cries this politico-economic Werther, sorry for 
your great loss. Observe our emotion, but pray observe 
how much pork you send us, and that you are shabby 
enough to put duties on goods you import from England. 
No logic would convince you you are wrong. Your intellect 
is bright enough. Yet you will persist in believing that if 
we send you what manufactures you want you will not 
require to manufacture yourself You are a big nation and 
England is a little one. It is all a mistake to suppose that 
England is a mighty empire. I, and such as I, have found 
out her pottiness. Don't you see how shabby you are in 
your dealings with such a little country? Behold those 
tears for your dead President, and remember you send us 
pork by the ship-load I 



10 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

Is there no man in England who has inherited Chatham's 
faith in her destiny to rebuke writers of this class ? Her 
great poet said she was never to lie at the foot of a proud 
conqueror. These grovellers would make her bury her fore- 
head in the dust before a few million customers. They may 
spare their tears. If they think to impress shrewd Yankees 
with ' the logic of emotion ' they will find they have to deal 
with men who do not believe in whimpering anywhere, but 
above all in matters of business ; who, however, we may be 
sure, have no objection to see degenerate Englishmen crouch- 
ing at their feet, but it won't move them, as they say, ' worth 
a cent.' There is no attitude in the world so sure to get 
more kicks than half-pence from the Ministers at "Washing- 
ton. The editor of the Contemporary Preview is well known 
not to be a very hard-headed person, and, notwithstanding 
the position of the magazine, he would not be worth noticing 
were it not that similar TJriah-Heapisms have appeared in 
the London papers, weekly and daily. It is almost pathetic 
in its imbecility — the desire to ' produce a favourable im- 
pression ' on all parts of the Republic, as though this favour- 
able impression would have some practical result, or the 
English Empire was at the mercy of, or had cause to fear, 
any nation however powerful. The salute of the English 
flag ordered by President Arthur is said to have touched 
the English nation very deeply ; but the way it was received 
in certain quarters proves that among the fifty millions 
there are Anglo-phobists, besides Fenians, and that under- 
bred rudeness will find rails to carry it far in commercial 
jealousy and ambition. It was not by the logic of emotion 
that England became great. Neither a nation nor an indi- 
vidual can hold a position of eminence except by right of 
superior strength. Hanging on by the skin of the teeth is 
an easy process compared with hanging on by the sufferance of 
human charity; but staying oneself on the 'favourable im- 
pressions' of a commercial rival, and that rival Brother 



BY PRESIDENT GARFIELD's DEATH. It 

Jonathan, is a triumph of self-mocker)'- which has never 
been surpassed since the soldier who sat on the point of his 
bayonet because he said he liked a soft thing. Mr. Froudo 
going outside his own country to plead her cause at the bar 
of the public opinion of another nation, and driven from 
his ' mission ' by the Irish servant-maids of Boston, was 
sufficiently undignified. But he is outdone by this trafficker 
in tears, this international bagman who welcomes humilia- 
tion provided he can take an order. Not one word from 
these gentlemen about Canada, except to misrepresent and 
contemn hor. "While the States contained but a few millions 
no such language was held ; and men of the same class, 
who deigned to speculate on her future, cast her horoscope 
with a sneer. But to-morrow, as time goes with a nation, 
Canada will be fifty millions. If what such men as Mr. 
"William Clarke desired, namely annexation, took place, what 
would the trade of England with this Continent be worth ? 
English exports hither would at once fall to the extent of all 
those articles which Canada imports from England, and the 
like of which are manufactured in the United States, whose 
merchant marine would be reinforced by that which is now 
the fourth in the world, and whose population would be 
swelled by five millions who would then have every reason to 
hate a country which had been at once feeble and false. 
These men, I know, do not speak for England. There is no sign 
of her decay. But her people and leaders cannot too nar- 
rowly watch the influences which make and modify 
national character. Her burden of Empire, easy for self- 
denial, for such men as raised the name of England above 

that of Rome is 

' heavy to carry • 

For hands overflowing with gold.' 

Naturally the grief within the Republic was greater than 
among other nations, however sympathetic. An English 
friend, who has travt^lled much in the United States, tells 



12 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

me that on first making the acquaintance of its people 
he thought there were only two things for which they 
had any reverence — a dollar and a lord ; but that after 
more intimacy he saw they also reverenced their 
President. He adds that, to-day, we are face to face 
with this dual paradox : in Europe, kings without 
loyalty ; on this continent, loyalty without kings. The 
moment a man is elected President he receives, though the 
head of a party, a genuine homage even from those in the 
ranks of his enemies. Peculiar circumstances inspired 
towards G-arfield feelings of a deeper and more special 
character than those with which a President is ordinarily 
regarded. The people of all grades felt that great dangers 
threatened the State, and that they had found the captain to 
weather the ship through the storm. Kings and aristocracies 
have been properly branded for making men admirals and 
generals who knew nothing of seamanship or war. After 
hundreds of lives and millions of money had been lost, and 
the honour of the country tarnished, the king or his mistress 
would be gracious enough to allow the appointment of 
ability. A shrewd observer, writing to a man of genius and 
character who had just become Prime Minister of England, 
while congratulating him, said his being entrusted with the 
formation of a Grovernment was a proof of the miserable 
state of the country ; for if it was possible to go on without 
integrity and ability they would never be thought of. If 
any one supposes the virus of the Spoils System has made its 
appearance within recent years, he is very ignorant of the 
history of the United States : nor is Mr. William Clarke, 
who writes about affairs on this continent with all the 
dogmatism of studious and erudite ignorance, right in his 
contention that Aaron Burr was the dark spirit who intro- 
duced corruption. Aaron Burr, himself, was a fruit of the 
system, and the conscienceless profligate, whose chief object 
was to destroy the free play of healthy public opinion by 



UY PRESIDENT QARl'lKL DS DEATH. l3 

skill in inanipulatincc ori^aiiizations, has never since been 
without a representative in the counsels of both parties. But 
a large number of circumstances connected with President 
Grant's administration excited alarm, and when a deter- 
mination to force a third term was manifested alarm 
deepened into terror. The evils of the Spoils System, of the 
rule of the ' bosses,' of the thimble-rigging of the managers, 
were fully realized, and perhaps some shame was felt that 
no better type of man could be had in the whole fifty mil- 
lions, than such as after, and some time before Lincoln's 
presidency, had filled the Presidential chair. When Garfield 
was nominated, it was felt that a man wholly different 
from the typical American statesmen had been found ; and 
when, on becoming President, he broke with Conkling the 
contrast was made more striking. 

The breach with Conkling was a proof of his courage and 
sincerity. It is doubtful whether it was wise or even justi- 
fiable. But this is a point which must be deferred for the 
moment. 

Garfield belonged to that class of great men whose great- 
ness cannot be separated from their personality — the breadth, 
charm and magnetism of their character ; nor is it likely 
that twenty years hence anything he has spoken or written 
will ever be referred to. His military genius was not of a 
high order. He was a highly educated man, but the condi- 
tions under which he studied made it impossible that he 
could be a great scholar. His mastery over the English 
language was considerable, but by no means extraordinary. 
A life's devotion is the price which must be paid for greatness 
as a lawyer, and that price was not within Garfield's power. 
But in whatever he did we see sincerity, the fire of noble 
purpose, great fertility of resource, fearlessness, and a leader- 
like tone. All this, combined with truthfulness and a cap- 



14 * REMARKS SUGGESTED 

acity for inspiring attachment in the hearts of good men, 
mark him as the possessor of some of the choicest elements 
of greatness. 

His life gives countenance to the theory that ' great men 
are the sons of great mothers.' The theory is fallacious, 
men inheriting ability from the father as often as from the 
mother, and the mothers of some great men having no more 
in common with their sons than the earth has with the rose 
it has nourished in its womb, or the cloud with the bolt 
which bursts from its heart of mist, and lights up the land- 
scape with beauty and terror, and carries ruin.where it strikes. 
But the theory flatters the modern worship of women which 
is specially strong in generous hearts, and, therefore, adds 
to the interest with which we follow a career whose 
distinction can be traced to a source so tender. Garfield's 
mother is undoubtedly a woman of a noble fibre. Her 
face has aristocratic features, with all the will and energy 
which made her, when necessary, a rail splitter. She came 
of a French stock, and the French brightness, clearness of 
resolve, and the beautiful French gaiety lit up the valuable 
but less fiery qualities her son derived from his father's 
family. The sentiment of woman worship is also appealed 
to by the need he experienced, in common with so many 
forceful natures of female sympathy, and the happy relations 
which existed between him and his wife. Of Miss Booth, 
whose influence on him seems to have been of the happiest 
description, he says : ' 1 never met the man whose mind I 
feared to grapple with ; but this woman could lead where I 
found it hard to follow.' A lady who was a fellow student 
with him at Hiram College describes him as 'repeating 
poetry by the hour.' 'He is,' she added, she having kept 
up her acquaintance with him after college days were over, 
' a man who, in the belief of any one who ever knew him, 
could not be corrupted, and who considers his honour above 



UY PUESIDENT OAUKIEI-B's DEATH. 15 

his ]ile.' ' 1 formed an intimate acquaintance with him,' 
says the Rev. T. Brooks, * and admired his genial, manly and 
pleasant ways.' He is described as witty and quick at 
repartee. 

When he became president of the college of which he had 
once swept the floor, he was sympathetic, full of kindness, 
yet a most stout disciplinarian, who ' enforced the rules like 
a martinet.' He was one of the most practical of men, 
though his Tennyson was as often as possible in his hands. 
His strong literary turn appealed to the imagination of the 
people of the United States, among whom education has 
made sufficient progress to enable them to realize that there 
is nothing antagonistic between culture and practical ability. 
Perhaps they had had enough of statesmen of defective 
education. It is, however, a popular fallacy which is not 
yet dead, that your practical man is best if he is ignorant 
— above all if he has no sympathy with poetry — and if his 
gifts are as far as possible from genius. The truth, however, is 
there is a close relation between literary capacity and practical 
power in all matters requiring thought — as, for instance, 
statesmanship or war, or the higher w^alks of commerce, 
Both Lord Beaconsfield and Canning were men of business 
power ; the one was a poet and novelist, the other a poet 
and journalist. David, whose name is one of the greatest in 
Jewish history, was a poet as well as a warrior and states- 
man ; Moses, a poet as well as a lawgiver and leader. The 
greatest among the G-reek poets were soldiers : ^schylus 
drinking in the fiery light of battle on the fields of Marathon 
and Plata^a, and across the victorious waves of Salamis, 
Sophocles commanding a division in the Samian war. 

With frowning brow o'er Pontiflf kings elate 
Stood Dante, great the man, the poet great : 

an eager Florentine politician, the reputation of the author 
of the ' Divine Comedy ' overtops the renown of the diplo* 



16 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

matist and statesman. Chancer, the father of Ensrlish sono- 
was a snccessfnl soldier, ambassador, and minister. Petrarch 
was an eager politician. In Milton's case the reputation of 
Cromwell's secretary and adviser is lost in the glory flooding 
the head of the author of ' Paradise Lost.' Alexander the 
Grreat was a man of enthusiastic literary taste. Csesar, the 
greatest of captains, a politician and statesman, was, after 
Cicero, the first literary man in Rome ; nor can he be seen 
in a more beautiful and heroic light than reading, writing, 
and making extracts in his carriage on his long journeys 
from battlefield to battlefield. The hard Frederick the G-reat 
composed verses in the intervals of battles. The political 
wisdom of Burke is proverbial ; yet he is, before all things, 
a poet, though writing in prose. The mind of the most 
successful and practical of all our own statesmen is saturated 
with English song. 

No one can come in contact — into intimate communion 
— with the highest minds, which are among the highest 
manifestations we have of G-od Himself, without the study 
of the poets, which enlarges and liberalizes and humanizes 
the ideal a man forms for himself. Cruelty and literary 
culture seem exclusive terms, and the first blow struck for 
the slave was dealt by a literary man, pure and simple. 
When a fugitive slave ran into G-arfield's camp, and an order 
was sent him by his superior officer, telling him to hunt up 
the negro and deliver him to his owner, G-arfield wrote on 
the order that he positively declined to allow his command 
to search for or deliver up any fugitive slaves. His friends 
were alarmed, but the spirit of his generous conduct was 
afterwards embodied in a general order. 

Garfield opposed the salary grab, but when it was iorced 
on an appropriation bill by a decided vote, the appropriation 
bill being a measure in the fate of which he was deeply 
interested, he felt bound to acquiesce. This vote took his 



BY PRESIDENT OARFIELD's DEATH. 17 

constituents ' in the pit of the stomach.' Grarfield went west 
to recapture the district, and did it, not by management for 
he was no manager, nor ihitti'ry, nor appeals to popular 
passions, but, as President Hinsdale testiiies, by ' the earnest, 
straightforward exposition of solid doctrine ; ' by the hio-h 
bearing of the man ; by the ' impact of his mental and moral 
power upon intelligent and honest minds.' He stood by 
' honest money,' and his speeches on this subject are models 
as popular expositions of financial principles. He never had a 
' machine,' and his aspirations for the nation were struck in 
a key of high moral feeling. But he was a trained politician, 
and his career would exemplify the teaching of Mr. Longley, 
in his excellent paper on ' Politics considered as a Fine Art.' 
It may be added at a time when there are such misconcep- 
tions regarding Freemasonry abroad, that this good and 
noble man was a mason. 

He was a true Christian politician — not using his Christian- 
ity as a means to cloak political infamy and catch pious but 
unperspicuous voters. Belonging to a sect in which the 
greatest simplicity prevails, and m which free utterance is 
allowed to all, he would preach to-day with the fervency of 
a Potts or a Rainsford, and to-morrow would, from the 
stump, advocate the cause of the Republican party. It need 
scarcely be said that though he struck hard blows he never 
hit below the belt, and never condescended to billingsgate or 
mendacity. And here, perhaps, we touch on the most potent 
key of those that called forth the threnody of universal sor- 
row — a sorrow which revealed a fund of feeling that only 
awaits the electric touch to wrap all nations in one flame of 
enthusiasm — issuing in some great united deed, compared 
with which the Crusades and even the great Iveformation 
will seem small things. There is at present no preacher, no 
teacher to touch it ; no new doctrine, no old dogma made 

fresh by human thought and feeling, to emit the enkindling 
2 



18 KEMARKS SUGGESTED 

spark. But the fund of unselfish emotion is there. Evolu- 
tion cannot touch it. I doubt if the tens of millions who 
sorrowed for G-arfield, and the tens of thousands who sub- 
scribed to the Garfield fund, would have sorrowed and 
subscribed, if they were sufiiciently advanced to believe that 
heaven and Grod are mere subjective illusions, that the 
anthropoid ape is our grandfather, and the marine ascidian 
the head of the house. 

Nor perhaps if G-arfield had been so scientific as to 
expunge God from the universe, would he have looked first, 
as he always did, for the approval of his conscience. The 
reason why ' the self-approving hour ' gives so much strength 
and peace, is that conscience proclaims the Great Contriver 
to be on our side, and all the forces of the universe therefore 
with us. In one of Garfield's speeches in the Ohio Senate, 
there is a passage which every young politician should learn 
by heart. It had been, he says, the plan of his life, to follow 
his convictions. He greatly desired the approbation of the 
district he represented in Congress, but he desired still more 
the approbation of one person, ' and his name was Garfield.' 
This was the only man he was compelled to sleep with, and 
eat with, and live with, and die with, and if he could not 
have had his approbation, he would have been in a bad way. 
This habit of mind is the only one which can keep a politi- 
cian erect in the slippery paths of politics. 

In his address, after nomination, he struck the key-note of 
Civil Service Eeform. One of his first acts, however, was to 
carry out the doctrine of spoils. But here we must travel 
back a little. 

The Roman historians and orators became transcendent 
liars the moment they spoke about their ancestors and the 
relations of their country with other nations. They were 
eloquent about Punic faith ; it would be interesting to know 
what Carthage thought of Roman perfidy. The half educated 



IIY I'KESIDENT GAKFIELD's DEATH. 19 

mediocrity to which pure democracies must always offer so 
wide a field, has nowhere had such scope as in the United 
States, and confident ignorance has never Haunted in such 
outrageous disregard of truth as in Fourth of July orations. 
The favourite rhetorical ruse, or flight of fancy, on those 
occasions is to picture the Fathers assembled in Council, 
Providence presiding, the Constitution emerging like some 
inspired result, and hailed with discriminating rapture by 
the American people. Anything more at variance with 
truth than this could not well be conceived. The Constitu- 
tion was the outcome of wrangling and difficulty, and was 
wrung by necessity from an unwilling people. Indeed the 
doctrine of State sovereignty never bit the dust until the 
close of the bloodiest and most costly civil war on record. 
Everything is exaggerated in the United States, and the evils 
which always follow great wars, and those evils which are 
the peculiar heritage of civil wars, manifested themselves 
on an unprecedented scale. Though G-rant took the first step 
in Civil Service Reform, he was, and is, a friend of the Spoils 
System. His disregard of republican simplicity, his willing- 
ness to compromise the independence of his great office by 
taking presents from all sides, the scandals and peculations 
brought home to some of his prominent supporters, his readi- 
ness to stand by them, even after their character took the com- 
plexion of infamy, forced on the minds of the best citizens 
the truth that all human institutions will have peculiar 
weaknesses characteristic of the structure, and marking the 
way in w^hich they act on, and are influenced by, human 
passions. So wildly have poets and orators spoken of freedom 
that men have not unnaturally attributed to it the power of 
a true divinity, whose ark would wither the hands which 
touched it profanely, whereas liberty is only a mood of 
human society wholly impossible in certain stages of human 
development, and which cannot exist once the majority of a 

2i 



20 KEMARKS SUGGESTED 

people have grown corrupt. Nothing can therefore be more 
absurd than the optimist views expressed by certain writers 
in regard to the United States. Propositions affirming by 
implication the approach of a political millenium are intro- 
duced by such phrases as ' it is felt,' ' it must be,' ' the needs 
of the race require it,' and the like, and curiously enough 
are placed side by side with chronicles of corruption. But 
democracy, we are told, is not responsible for any oi the evils 
in the Democracy, which are due to some external and malign 
power ; as if every form of government was not an out- 
growth of human conditions practically co-extensive with 
the people to which it may belong, though capable of acting 
back with plastic powder on the conditions from which it 
emerged, with ever newly modified results. The mass of 
men can see no distinction which is not made tangible, and 
equality, therefore, while teaching them the priceless lessons 
of independence, after some time makes them consider the 
power of money-getting the one thing needful. There is no 
time for self-culture — culture is therefore meagre ; and all 
men being equal, the greatest ambitions are, without shame, 
entertained by small capacities. Every man is his own 
standard ; and the tendency is to resent intellectual eminence. 
There being but one or two great social and political forces, 
and no variety in the motives of conduct and ideals of life, 
men become as like each other as peas ; real individuality 
fades, while individual aggressiveness becomes universal. 
There is more general comfort than under aristocratic condi- 
tions, and for the absence of great men there is a compensa- 
tion in the shape of widely diffused material happiness. But 
though forests of steeples point to heaven, and no sun rises 
without glittering on ten thousand crosses, the tendency in 
such a society is to make a god of mammon. 

The hope for popular institutions is in the intelligence of 
the people ; their danger that the people, even though Intel- 



BY PRESIDENT OARFIELD's DEATH. 21 

licfont, allow thomselves, when not in the fivceof amenacino- 
crisis or not stirrod by some groat excitement, to act on low 
motives. The proposition that a people is too intellio-oiit 
to be robbed of freedom is one which must be qualified in 
every case. It is not rational to believe that men can con- 
stantly go near the brink of the cataract, yet always escape 
going over the falls. On the eve of the late election the 
danger was great, and an etfort, almost superhuman, was 
made to fling off the system which had the Republic by the 
throat. But the powers of darkness, as represented by 
Conkling, Cameron and Logan, and their machines, were 
strong, and they bent all their resources to secure the prize 
for G-rant. The Republican party in New York, Pennsylvania 
and Illinois wished to give what the French would call the 
imperative mandate to the delegates to the nominating Con- 
vention. The delegates are chosen by Congressional Districts, 
but at the State Conventions resolutions were passed pledg- 
ing the States to vote each one as a unit for Grant. This 
was a good instance of how far the tyranny of organization, 
when divorced from broad views and statesmanlike capacity, 
will aspire to go, and shows how completely after a time it 
throws aside all respect for constitutional procedure ; and 
what an enemy it is of deliberation, its constant aim being 
to make deliberative assemblies elaborate frauds. The first 
question raised in the convention was whether the delegates 
from Republican States should be bound by the resolutions 
of the State Conventions, or whether the district rule should 
prevail and the delegates vote as they thought best. Robert- 
son, of New York, was the leader of the party which broke 
away from the daring usurpation of dictatorial power by the 
machines. The man he and his friends tried for was Blaine, 
Garfield himself being for Sherman, of Ohio. The opposition 
to Grant was shared between Blaine, Sherman, and Edmunds. 
Garfield, from the first, ' divided the honours ' with Conkling, 
that is to say, he was received with demonstrations of respect 



22 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

as enthusiastic as those which greeted the great wire-puller. 
His speech in favour of Sherman made a profound impression 
on the Convention, and when vote after vote was taken and 
no progress made, and the followers of no one of the 
Republican opponents of G-rant would give way to those of 
the other, and three hundred standing each time solid by 
G-rant, a cry rose spontaneously : ' would it were G-arfield ! ' 
and the flags of the various States moved up amid loud cheers 
round what then became the banner from Ohio. 

The Constitution is framed on the principle that the people 
may be trusted to do what is really best for themselves — 
that is, what is best for the nation at large. But this prin- 
ciple, as we have seen, takes for granted a great deal for 
which unfortunately there is no foundation in fact. The 
individuals who compose a people may be trusted to do what 
seems to each one the best for himself A few take the course 
marked out by wisdom and duty ; but many generations will 
have passed away before men generally rise to the height— if 
they ever will — of looking at what is best for themselves, indi- 
vidually, in a manner which would make that glance coinci- 
dent with what is best for the nation. The instant the fear 
of oppression is over, egotism is allowed full play, and 
when a man cannot get an important position for himself, 
he wants it for his cousin ; and when he cannot get it for 
his cousin, he wants it for his fellow-townsman ; when 
his fellow-townsmen are out of the question, he wants 
it for some one in his section of the country. The Con- 
stitution decrees that the President and Vice-President 
shall be elected at the same time and by the same body, and 
that should the President for any cause be no longer able to 
discharge the duties of President, these shall devolve on the 
Vice-President. In, therefore, electing a Vice-President, a 
possible President is chosen. But this contingency being 
remote, is never allowed any influence ; and the candidate 
for President once fixed on, the candidate for Vice-President 



BY PRESIDENT QARPIELD's DEATH. 23 

IS chosen with the view of throwing- a sop to sectional 
jealousy. Accordingly, Garfield ])L'ing from the west, Arthur 
was chosen from the east, and also because he was a follower of 
Conkling. The necessity of propitiating Conkling, the price 
paid, furnishes a measure of his power. The Stalwarts were 
beaten, but they might fiiirly hope to have considerable 
influence; and Conkling evidently expected to be allowed to 
rule in New York. 

How did G-arfield act ? He was daring but not consistent. 
He appears as the champion of Civil Service Reform, but the 
act which probably led to his death, was one which carried 
out to its utmost length the democratic doctrine, that 
he had himself denounced : ' to the victors belong the 
spoils.' The officer he removed from the collector.ship at the 
port of New York was a Republican and a Civil Service 
reformer. Ho did not belong to either the section which 
opposed or supported G-arfield, who was, therefore, displacing 
not a member of an opposing party, but a bureaucratist 
who was in favour of Civil Service Reform, and in all points 
fit for the position, in order to place there a supporter of his 
own. Conkling is no friend to Civil Service Reform. What 
then was Garfield's offence ? He made an appointment in New 
York State without consulting the Duke of New York — as 
Conkling is sometimes called — the person appointed, more- 
over, as tlie leader of those who broke away from the unit 
scheme, being personally offensive to the bold machinator 

"What occurred, instead of affording a text for a sermon 
against party, illustrated in reality the confusion following 
on a disregard of the duties which arise from party relations. 
In fact, Garfield, Conkling and Guiteau were all bad party 
men. Had the unhappy assassin been a good party man he 
would have crushed down his personal predilections and 
acquiesced in the decision of the Republican party. His act 
was the extreme expression of faction, all the conditions of 



24 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

which were fulfilled by Grant and his junto ; faction being 
distinguished from party by this : that one pursues its ends 
on personal, the other on public grounds ; the aim of the 
former is individual aggrandizement, of the latter the welfare 
of the country. 

Unfortunately, the President of the United States remains 
the leader of a party. If he is not the leader before election 
he is at once elevated to that position. The relation 
between leader and follower implies reciprocal duties. 
Conkling belongs to that dangerous type of politician who 
gains power, not by learning or wisdom, not by statesman- 
ship or greatness in any walk, but solely by reason of cun- 
ning and a capacity for organization. He is a manager, a 
boss, a runner of the machine —that is all. His claims to 
greatness rest largely on his control of party organization. 
Now party organization is a good thing. In fact without 
party organization efiicient government in democratic 
communities would be impossible. But good things may be 
abused ; a gun is a good thing, but in the hands of a robber on 
a lonely road all that gives it value only makes it the better 
ally of crime ; and party organization when grasped by bad 
men of narrow ideas and ungenerous aspirations becomes a 
silent, stealthy garrotter of opinion, a means whereby design- 
ing knaves may slay freedom under the dome of her chosen 
sanctuary, Conkling proved himself a bad, unpatriotic man. 
Nor had he, according to some, great provocation ; for it is 
contended that the collectorship at the port of New York, at 
which most of the customs duties for the entire country are 
collected, is a national office, the appointment to which 
should not be confined by State lines. But even taking the 
strongest view of its local character that could be taken, 
still the true course, from our point of view of allegiance to 
party, was to submit, and wait for redress from time, and 
from the sense of justice in the entire party, all whose 



BY PRESIDENT QARFIELD's DEATH. 25 

interests and instincts are opposed to endorsing' snubbing a 
man of sterling- services. This is the course whicli prudence, 
which proper pride, which party honour, which patriotism, 
all suggested. Because it is not possible that the principles 
of a party can be carried out if everybody who has, or who 
thinks he has, a personal grievance, begins to kick and bolt, 
and a proud man will make it clear that he has not joined a 
party for personal ends. It is barely possible to conceive 
a case where self-respect and party allegiance clash. Now 
the claims of self-respect are paramount. If a man's self- 
respect will no longer permit him to follow the leader, his 
duty, as self-respect itself will suggest, is, temporarily or 
finally, to retire from politics, not to go over to the other 
side or to seek to create mutiny in the camp If a man gives 
a leader support, it ought not to be like the purring of a cat, 
endowed with no longer existence than while he is rubbed 
the right way ; it should be a consistent and generous sup- 
port, which bad treatment even could not impair, always 
understanding that the bad treatment is not of a character 
the endurance of which is inconsistent with self-respect. 
This is the only dignified course — this the only course which 
will save a party man from demoralization. Praising your 
leader to-day because he has done something you admire, 
abusing him to-morrow because he has thought fit not to 
take you into his confidence, is a process of rapid moral 
decline. It is fatal to success. A squealer is not only weak, 
but his squealing proclaims his weakness, and in no sphere 
are the words of Milton so true as in politics — ' to be weak 
is miserable.' A politician who is worth anything to the 
country will be well content if the principles he has 
advocated are being carried out ; if he is to be worth much 
to his party, he ought to be able to put a bearing-rein on 
his indignation, even when he has cause to be angry. A 
mutinous party man developes a habit of requiring to be 
soothed by his leader until he becomes at once as weak and 



26 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

as annoying as a spoiled, querulous child. If he was ever 
resolute he becomes irresolute, and all the motions of his 
mind have the fiabbiness of a broken will ; each morning 
hears him swear he will fire the camp, but night inevitably 
falls without his striking a match. He makes it palpable 
to the world that egotism, not principle, is the guide of his 
actions, and becomes an object of as much moral interest as 
a hangman who, having fallen out with his employers, pro- 
ceeds to avenge himself by joining the Society for the Aboli- 
tion of Capital Punishment ; on his lips a jibe at the sheriff, 
his hands twitching for a job. 

But though this strong view of party allegiance is the true 
view, it is impossible to acquit President G-arfield of all 
blame. The principles by which a man who has attained 
supreme power should be guided in making appointments 
are clear. 1st. He should appoint the most efficient men. 
2nd. "When there are two or more men equally efficient, he 
should appoint that one who has given most help to himself 
in attaining to supreme power. No one has a right to 
aspire to any position, still less to the first position in a 
State, unless he thinks himself the candidate likely to 
prove most useful to the people. It is assumed that the 
reason a good and wise man wishes to have himself 
elected for any trust, is because of his opinions and prin- 
ciples, and his views as to carrying them out, In propor- 
tion as his convictions are strong, in the same proportion he 
must feel that the persons who have helped him to power have 
to the measure of their capacity served the State. Now the 
State is not exempt any more than an individual, from the 
law of gratitude. If the person supporting you, and securing 
your success, is opposed to you personally, but, nevertheless, 
gives you assistance rather then see his party — that is a 
certain body of principles of government — beaten, he really 
deserves better of his country than if his sentiments towards 
you personally were friendly. 



BY PRESIDENT QARFIELD's DEATH. 2t 

In the late presidential election it would have been a most 
disastrous thing had power passed into the hands of the 
Democratic party. That party is not yet fit to have the 
destinies of the country placed in its grasp. Had Mr. Conk- 
ling, baffled in fixing on Grant, showed in the Convention 
anything like the bull-in-a-china-shop spirit he showed 
afterwards, he could have prevented G-arfield's election. 
Therefore, some consideration was due to him ; and it should 
have been made perfectly clear that, when the Senator from 
New York was not consulted, only the interests of the 
country, apart from any shade of personal feeling, were 
considered. 

Now Robertson undoubtedly did Garfield great service, 
and, therefore, on the i^rinciple laid down, great service to 
the State. But Conkling had also done him great service. 
Let it be granted, for argument's sake, that the services of 
Robertson outweighed Conkiing's. The appointment, on 
which the gage of battle was thrown down, was the collec- 
torship at the port of New York. The occupant, Mr. Merritt, 
was a member of the Republican party. He was a Civil 
Service reformer. The public service had grown more efficient 
under his hand. He had been appointed by President Hayes, 
ill spite of the opposition of Mr. Conkling, whose nominee 
Mr. Arthur was. In 1879, he bore emphatic testimony to the 
benefit resulting from admissions to the service by examina- 
tion and removals only for cause. 

Now, if Grarfield was prepared to ignore the claims of 
Conkling, it is clear he ought to have left Merritt where he 
was. This would have shown the world that he was acting 
solely in the interest of Civil Service Reform, and that if he 
was shutting down on Conkiing's predilections, if predi- 
lections he had, he had previously shut down on his own. 
This course if it did not conciliate Conkling would have 
deprived him of all moral support among the best 



28 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

spirits in the Stalwart ranks ; it would have soothed 
the worst and it would have challenged universal 
admiration. It is true the blue ribbon of the spoils would 
not have fallen to Robertson, who had done great services. 
But in this case a higher interest of the State was opposed 
to a lower. Merritt being efficient — a Republican — the 
embodiment of Civil Service Reform— leaving him in his 
post was the very strongest step which could be taken in 
favour of the new and better departure. The appointment 
of Robertson, who was equally honest, no doubt, only carried 
out one good principle— that of rewarding those who have 
served the State. The same principle, and others equally 
valuable, would have been honoured by keeping Merritt 
where he was. 

If the Spoils System was to be acted on, then the just and 
wise course was to come to some understanding with 
Conkling, and it is easy to conceive as possible— though the 
cogency of the present reasoning does not depend on this — 
such an understanding as would have induced Conkling to 
have enrolled himself on G-arfield's side. In politics, 
as in all other fields of action, we may be sure the best thing 
is to make complete justice— no maimed or partial divinity 
— our guide. A politician, moreover, by his very profession, 
is bound to be politic, and in aiming at any great change, 
he will seek to offend as few susceptibilities as possible. 
How, had G-arfield not fallen by the hand of an assassin, he 
would have gone forward, it is not possible to doubt. He 
would probably, after two terms, have left the "White House, 
having brought the Civil Service to a condition by which 
corruption was fenced off, and the maximum of efficiency 
secured. He would have thrown the weight of his character 
and office on the side of temperance, would have given an 
example of republican simplicity, and in the most emphatic 
^ay — namely, by his acts -marked his disapproval of any 



BY PRESIDENT GARKlELU's DEATH. 29 

officer, above all the head of the State, taking bribes under 
the name of presents. His whole political conduct betrays 
the refinement which scholarship imparts to character, and 
the dignity which is given to a politician by having open to 
him more than one field of achievement, and such a man 
would not have surrounded himself with gamblers and 
trotting masters, but with those who prove, by their deeds, 
that they think the cultivation of the mind the noblest work 
in which energy can be consumed ; the anecdotes which 
would have emerged from the Presidential circle would not 
have had reference to ' draw poker ' and cigars and blood 
horses ; his children would have been saved, by his culture 
and good sense, from behaving with indecent social aggres- 
siveness ; while Mrs. G-arfield's influence would have been 
against the reign of social queens, whose idea of good ton 
is extravagance, and in whose sight character counts for 
nothing and costly drapery is all. We can follow him into 
dignified retirement, w^hich his literary attainments and 
gifts w^ould have redeemed from obscurity ; gifts and attain- 
ments which would have saved him from hankering after 
such political activity as is incongruous and injurious for an 
ex-President, and would have enabled him to rest his claims 
to recognition and reverence on supports not w^holly drawn 
from the past. He had the faculty of growth, and it is 
morally certain his mind had not registered the highest 
water-mark of its possible development ; and in order to 
realize what the United States may have lost by his death, 
we must think what a ditferent estimate the world would 
have formed of Beaconsfield, of Thiers, of Palmerston, of 
Chaucer, of Grladstoue, had they died at fifty years of age. 
He might, like some of these men, have done his greatest 
works after his shoulders had bowed to the first touch of old 
age, and, like others of them, have raised a standard by which 
politicians and statesmen could test themselves and be tested 
by others. In any case he would have left behind him a 



30 REMARKS SUGGESTED 

reputation which a generous ambition would covet above 
all others, that of a man who had arrested his country in a 
downward • career, and called from latency into vigorous 
action moral forces that paralyzed principles which were 
striking at her life, and under whose blows she had begun 
to totter to her fall. 

Ho doubt it is easier to picture such a career on paper than 
to have made it a fact. That he was hardly sufficiently alive 
to the need in which a great ruler of men stands of compio- 
mise, not with principle — never for one moment with 
principle — but in details of administration, is evident ; and 
it is equally clear that as sure as the waves which beat them- 
selves white against the cliffs are composed of the same 
chemical elements as the great mass of less angry sea which 
presses from behind, the pitiful assassin, in his sense of 
injustice and resentment, though not in his mode of expres- 
sing these, was representative of hundreds, amongst whom 
are remarkable and powerful men. Forces, the magnitude 
of which at this hour it is not easy to measure, would have 
had to be coped with and crushed. It is not permitted to 
doubt that crushed they would have been, because but a 
small portion of the people is interested in corruption, and 
corruption can flourish only while the people are listless or 
sleep in security, and there was abundant evidence that the 
people were not only awake, but active in the cause of reform. 
Still heroic footsteps sometimes falter on the ridge of power, 
and it may be that G-arfield's sufferings and death have done 
more for his country than would have been accomplished by 
two terms of his rule. His tragic end stimulated the 
reflection and awakened the conscience of the people, and 
Woe to them if they do not act on the good resolves made in 
the hour of national afiliction and bereavement. President 
Arthur evidently means to do well. Arthur, the follower 
of Conkling, and Arthur, the President of the United States, 



BY PRESIDENT GARFIELD'S DEATH. 31 

are two A'ery different individuals in their liberty and oppor- 
tunities. It is the curse of such political organization as 
exists in New York, that a man of spirit cannot give his 
services to his country without being brought in contact 
with some unholy machinery. But the President is free — 
not from a sense ol' obligation to Mr. Conkling — he would be 
a bad man did he not cherish gratitude to the great wire-puller 
— but free to break away from Conkling's traditions, perhaps 
his trammels, and to place himself at the head of the upward 
and better movement of which his predecessor was the 
embodiment. It would be unjust to the President to say ho 
played the part of Saul to the Stephen of political purity ; 
but, without impropriety, he may be urged to prove himself 
the Paul of the cause, to which at the time he was certainly 
no friend, and for which Garfield fell a proto-martyr. Should 
he fail, he will be remembered in history as the dark foil of the 
pure spirit whose inspiration he could not catch, as a man at 
whose feet chance placed the opportunities of a world, but who 
proved himself only fit to be a minor wheel in a provincial 
donkey-engine. Whether he fails or succeeds, the responsibility 
of the people remains. There is a warning for them, not merely 
in G-uiteau's guilt, but in the violence and guilt oi' presump- 
tions scoundrels, some of whom wore the uniform of the 
country, who would have taken the unhappy murderer out 
of the arbitrament of law. In those eager passions, in that 
desire to take justice into private hands, in the readiness to 
resort to a pistol in a row, and to mendacious scandal in 
argument, there is peril. But the power is with the people 
and, therefore, the remedy, if they have the moral and intel- 
lectual qualities to apply it. They need to be reminded, as 
do their eulogists in England, who, we may be sure, were, 
a few years ago, among their most irrational and cynical 
critics, that the vast unoccupied country to the west has 
hitherto prevented the Republic being subjected to the strain 
which will come when it is thickly peopled ; that history 



32 REMARKS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT GARPIELD's DEATH. 

and revelation would both suggest a law of ethnic sub-divi- 
sion ; that up to the present the peoples who have shown the 
o-reatest mastery of the art of government have been those 
whose characters were formed, not under the influence of 
one or two great principles, but of many. Let monuments 
and statues rise to G-arfield, but let his countrymen beware 
lest they swell the category of those who build the tombs of 
prophets whose teaching they ignore or outrage. The true 
monument to Garfield will be the inauguration of a new 
era both as regards methods and men. On the day of the 
solemn services at Washington, amid dark scarf and drooping 
banner, a rainbow appeared. Like that bow of promise, 
sentiments, regrets, hopes, resolves, aspirations, sorrow, 
during the weeks immediately succeeding his death, spanned 
the Republic, giving to it a strange, tender grandeur, and 
genuine moral beauty. It is to the spiritual forces thus 
indicated we must look to stay and strengthen the confidence 
that corruption will not be allowed to overwhelm the 
achievements of the past and all the hopes which look for 
fruition to the future. 




I Adoo 

9ZQ- 

LS9 3 



